Dean Metropoulos, the billionaire boss of private equity firm Metropoulos & Co., has made many a fortune reviving classic consumer brands like Pabst Blue Ribbon, Bumble Bee Tuna, and Chef Boyardee. His recent deal, buying a shuttered Hostess Brands, might be his sweetest return of all. Along with Andy Jhawar of Apollo Global, Metropoulos paid $410 million for the bankrupt baker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Sno Balls. After $250 million of capital improvements, Metropoulos and Apollo are sitting on a gain of about $2 billion. How did they pull it off? Modernizing technology, logistics, marketing, and by making the Twinkie--famous for its immortal shelf life--stay fresh even longer.

Dean Metropoulos joined The Forbes Interview podcast to talk about how he revived Hostess back to life, how he spots brands ripe for rehab, and the future of American manufacturing.

Some highlights:

How Metropoulos saved the Hostess Twinkie:

We recognized that it was a super brand--a brand that had tremendous heritage with the U.S. consumers. It had tremendous potential to innovate and to continue to survive. And that was the start of our interest. Secondly, we obviously assessed that it was having a number of issues and challenges related to the burden of the balance sheet. There was too much debt, a lot of assets were underutilized, and there a lot of contracts that could not have been easily changed. The Chapter 7 process allowed us to take that-- and by the way, it's the first transaction we bought through Chapter 7, which is the final bankruptcy. The business shuts down. The process effectively allowed us to take only the assets we wanted and the contracts that were limiting the company's flexibility to continue to run as an agile, highly innovative business. So those elements were there. We loved the brand. We thought the brand was still very relevant. Consumers had a lot of loyalty to it. And we provided the vehicle to effectively restructure it and to move forward with it.

How Metropoulos and Apollo modernized the stodgy Hostess brand:

We did two things things. Surprisingly enough, the company Hostess, before its bankruptcy, had been doing a lot of work for about two or three years to extend the shelf life. How do you extend it? You use natural enzymes. You adjust the moisture. Too much moisture tends to break down a product faster. All those scientific things that had been already put to work, we refined those and put them into motion. That gave us the ability to extend the shelf life to 65 days from 26 or 27. And that allowed us to change the model, which was critical to the company's turnaround. The model instead of going up and down the street delivering to every little convenience store and every supermarket, we went to the warehouse of these stores and the supermarkets. And that took out 20,000 trucks that were running around making $50 stops or $60 stops to deliver Twinkies and cupcakes and so on. And now we deliver full trucks or a half a truck. And that makes a very big difference.

On how to market Twinkies when sugar and processed foods are falling out of fashion.

You cannot forget the base consumer's desires. And, look, sugar's gonna be around for a long time. Or we wouldn't be eating ice cream. We wouldn't be eating chocolate bars. We wouldn't be eating all kinds of products that have honey or sugar or other sweeteners, which all shares sort of the same elements.At the same time, I must tell you, if not-- once a month, we have all these outside labs that come into us and talk to us about how do we evolve new products and new versions of a product, even if it cannibalizes our other offering. We understand if you introduce a new product that has different elements to it and ingredients, it's gonna cannibalize some of the conventional one. But that's okay. We talk continually about how to evolve this product line to meet what consumers are looking for today. It's probably the number one concern that we talk about at least once a month with outside scientific labs. We're doing R & D work with several universities across the country to meet some of the healthier offerings that you're talking about, while still offering and not losing the consumer that enjoys it with the smile on their face.